Thank you for visiting my site. I have a lot of interests and try to use this space to keep track of what I am reading and thinking and to let people know what I am doing.

Just to list a few topics, I am deeply interested in energy and how we use it (the latter part often startles me). I care a lot about the environment, and am interested in politics, at least in how it affects the things I care most about. I am strongly interested in research into the detection and treatment of cancer. In college, I studied biology and computer science and remain interested in these areas. My advanced degrees are in computer science, so my natural science interests these days are often (but not always) of a computational science slant.

I read a fair bit of information about my interests and aim to share it with other people (not always effectively!). It would be nice to strike up conversations.

Outside of intellectual pursuits, I am fond of the outdoors and backpacking in particular (although I rarely do go backpacking). Bicycling is a new activity for me, and I believe I have an interest in randonneuring, but right now I am just commuting.

I grew up near Iowa City, Iowa and am still fond of the area. I find most people have a fondness of where they are from, so maybe it is not surprising that I like Iowa. The natural areas near my home there are a big part of my like for the region. There is a lot of open space and wildlife to enjoy and I feel more “balanced” when I am there, if that makes any sense.

Right now, I live in Kirkland, Washington and work in Redmond at Microsoft. It is pretty nice here too: mountains to the east and west and lots of water nearby. It has been less cloudy than expected. I am still impressed that I can see Mount Ranier many days. It is really quite striking.

Academic Background

In May 2007, I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I specialized in scientific computing and am particularly interested in algorithm and data structure design and development. My dissertation, titled Efficient Setup Algorithms for Parallel Algebraic Multigrid, focused on parallel coarse grid selection algorithms for algebraic multigrid (AMG) and was conducted under the guidance of my advisors Luke Olson and Paul Saylor.

I earned a M.S. in Computer Science at UIUC in 2004 under the guidance of Paul Saylor. My Masters research was influenced heavily by the work I did in my first summer at the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Further back, I earned a B.S. in Biological Science and Computer Science at the University of Iowa.

Publications

• D. M. Alber. Modifying CLJP to select grid hierarchies with lower operator complexities and better performance. Numer. Linear Algebra Appl., 13:87-104, 2006.
• D. M. Alber and L. N. Olson. Parallel coarse grid selection. Numer. Linear Algebra Appl., 14:611-643, 2007.
• C. Chang, D. Alber, P. Graf, K. Kim, and M. Seibert. Addressing unknown constants and metabolic
  network behaviors through petascale computing: understanding H₂ production in green algae. J.
  Phys.: Conf. Ser., 78 012011, 2007.
• C. H. Chang, P. Graf, D. M. Alber, K. Kim, G. Murray, M. Posewitz, and M. Seibert. Photons, photosynthesis, and high-performance computing: challenges, progress, and promise of modeling metabolism in green algae. J. Phys.: Conf. Ser., 125 012048, 2008.
• D. M. Alber and L. N. Olson. Coarsening invariance and bucket-sorted independent sets for algebraic multigrid, submitted.

Post-Doctoral Biography

Shortly after completing my Ph.D., I started a postdoctoral position in the Scientific Computing Center (now the Materials and Computational Science Center) at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado.

My primary project at NREL was part of a computational systems biology project called “Green Energy: Advancing Bio-hydrogen“. Briefly, the project aims to: (1) construct a comprehensive metabolic model for the hydrogen-producing green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii; (2) produce high-performance software for solving problems arising from the rate equations encoded in the model.

In February 2009, I started a position at Microsoft in which I research topics in numerical linear algebra and other areas of scientific computing.